Wash Clothes Before You Wear Them

Most fabrics (and items made of fabric, i.e.: clothing, towels, sheets, etc.) are also sprayed with pesticides before being exported from their originating countries; countries that have very different laws regarding chemicals than we do here. Many pesticides are based on neurological toxins. The more interesting (and possibly, terrifying) study would test what chemicals are still present in new clothing.
Perhaps that tic in your eye isn’t quite as innocent as you hoped.

I caught scabies from trying on clothes at a store. At least, that is what the doctor and I concluded. I thought that it might be okay to try on because it was in a seemingly unopened package.

Nevertheless, one of my very first jobs while in college was as a ‘fitting-room checker’ at a major upscale department store. Fairly frequently, I would come upon merchandise that was smeared with feces, or semen, and the tailor’s helper would clean them off and then back to the rack. Returned merchandise was also given a quick once over and then back to the selling floor.

Also, that bathing suit you just bought? It seemed to me that most people tried on a bathing suit while naked. Pervs would try on dozens of Speedos and strut about, and then drop the suit to the floor. Boxers were also tried on by the gross, and some guys would stand in front of the public mirror, stripping off and putting on the next one.

If you are not washing the clothes that you buy, welcome to everything another person can excrete, emit, ooze, flake, and shed.

Well, there’s trace amounts of fecal matter on just about everything, face it, we’re dirty animals no matter how much we try to hide it.

Second, I’m a dude and so I had no idea people try on clothes at the store.

Not surprising…..but then I can’t imagine how much “excretions” we consume each week when we don’t wash and cook it ourselves. Those cookies Sue brought from home and put in the break room? Like her cats haven’t been all over them before her kid sneezed on them after they came out of the oven.

A lot of these studies are just media fear mongering to drive up readers/viewers. Nearly everything we touch, eat, drink and breathe has bacteria on or in it and it’s no surprise that they find stuff when they break out the microscope. Before you have a full on panic attack though remember that our immune systems are the product of literally millions and millions of years of our near constant exposure to filth. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever wash your hands and eat whatever you find lying on the ground but also understand it’s impossible and impractical to sterilize everything around us.

To the person who caught scabies though that does suck. I can see why you’d make a point to wash new clothes before you wear them now but something like that is probably fairly uncommon.

I learned this lesson when I bought new pants from Garage once. I got a rash, it hurt like hell too. Not goodtimes.

I worked, post-divorce, at Wal-Mart. I sometimes worked the phones/fitting room. Nasty stuff. Trust me, you want to wash YOU after you try on clothes. You don’t want to wear the clothes before you wash them. The same holds true of consignment stores. It is easy to iron a dirty outfit, put dirty clothes on a wire hanger, add the plastic laundry bag, and drop it off~! (Yes. I did.)

Or I can just continue to not care and wear clothes 3 or 4 times before they go through their first wash. Cheerio!

This is true. It is better, especially for kid clothes, to wash them first before using. This is to lessen risks of fungal infections. You can just use the quick wash cycle of your washing machine for this. If your washing machine has steam fresh cycle, all the better to remove germs and bacteria.

i also heard of a detergentless washer …imagine that no detergent and no water !!!!! smart appliances doing what we want when we want them sounds interesting. I heard from a friend installing the new smart grid in people’s homes – how this smart grid thing would alert you by phone when you get low of milk in the fridge!!!! pretty cool having reminders like this automatically